Post-apocalyptic books, films and TV shows are always topical, tapping into our fears of global warming, terrorism, nuclear weapons and various natural disasters. Riddley Walker has its own dialect, a crude yet eloquent blend of Kent accent, Chaucerian English, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Burgess’s Nadsat language from A Clockwork Orange. If the line above strikes you as being full of typos, rest assured, it’s meant to be like that. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.“Dyou mean to tel me them befor us by the time they done 1997 years they had boats in the air and all them things and here we are weve done 2347 years and mor and stil slogging in the mud?”
Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture-rebel, change agent, and artist. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state-and invented a language to represent it. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. "An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' -Paul Gray, Time Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." -Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan Ferociously inventive." -Walter Clemons, Newsweek "Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." -John Leonard, The New York Times Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." -Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." -Anthony Thwaite, Observer The conviction and consistency are total. "Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.
"This is what literature is meant to be." -Anthony Burgess Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and-this matters most-intensely ponderable." -Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.
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